Why develop an Image Database? Appearance matters

 

Perhaps more than any other animal, cephalopods, the class of Mollusks containing octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are able to change their appearance.  Body patterns are composed of color, posture, movement and texture.  These are used in avoiding predation (e.g. crypsis) and inter- and intra- specific communication.

 

The most obvious component of appearance is color.  Cephalopods use specialized cells in their skin to change color.  The most commonly studied of these are the chromatophores Figure 1, which are under direct neural control. This allows cephalopods to change their color in a fraction of a second.  They can make patterns based on a series of rapid color changes. 

 

Cephalopods can raise and lower papillae in their skin and change their texture in an instant.  They have few to no hard internal structures in their body and this allows them to change posture.  They have movement tricks such as jet escape and can also produce ink decoys.  All of these components are used together so the animal’s color, shape, position and texture can rapidly change from one moment to the next.